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Re: enterprise-level accessibility evangelism

for

From: Denis Boudreau
Date: Jun 8, 2010 10:24PM

Hi Katherine,

I think you'll find plenty of information on the subject here: <http://www.w3.org/WAI/bcase/Overview.html>;.

Financial factors usually prove particularily interesting for private companies, as can be legal and policy factors.

Extract:
Factors in a Business Case for Web Accessibility

The different aspects of the business case for Web accessibility are presented in detail in the following pages:

Social Factors addresses the role of Web accessibility in providing equal opportunity for people with disabilities; the overlap with digital divide issues; and benefits to people without disabilities, including older people, people with low literacy and people not fluent in the language, people with low bandwidth connections to the Internet, people using older technologies, and new and infrequent web users.
Technical Factors addresses interoperability, quality, reducing site development and maintenance time, reducing server load, enabling content on different configurations, and being prepared for advanced web technologies.
Financial Factors addresses the financial benefits of increased website use, for example, from engine optimization (SEO); direct cost savings; considerations for initial costs and on-going costs; and ways to decrease costs.
Legal and Policy Factors addresses requirements for Web accessibility from governments and other organizations in the form of laws, policies, regulations, standards, guidelines, directives, communications, orders, or other types of documents.
To help develop a customized business case, each of these pages starts with questions to help identify how the factors apply to a specific organization.



--
Denis Boudreau
www.twitter.com/dboudreau




On 2010-06-08, at 6:41 PM, Katherine Mancuso wrote:

> Hi Web-AIMers -
>
> Long time reader, first time questioner, please be gentle :-).
>
> Does anyone here have a lot of experience with introducing web
> accessibility into a corporation?
>
> I'm not going to tell you where I'm working this summer for fear of
> trouble, but this is a large division of a large company responsible
> for hundreds of professional web properties - a company that also
> makes physical facilities and prides themselves on them being
> accessible to many different kinds of people including people with
> disabilities, and that in the future sees physical-digital convergence
> as a huge business initiative. They have one web creative lead
> working on accessibility as a side project, who isn't really trained
> but wants to evangelize for the importance of this. And me, as an
> intern, who also has other responsibilities. The main thing the two
> of us have agreed I need to do here is make the case for
> accessibility, and for people to work more full-time on it, or to
> bring in a company as a contractor that specializes in this, by doing
> a lot of teaching to a lot of people.
>
> However, I've always worked at a small research center focused on
> accessibility; I've taken classes but none of them covered enterprise
> level web accessibility (there's one chapter in the big pink web
> accessibility book). I have a big job. I know what the legal issues
> are, and how to make the business case, how to teach about universal
> design, and the basics I need to teach them. The thing I don't know
> is the kind of processes I need to recommend to an organization this
> large, and how accessibility work is different at this scale.
>
> I need pointers to resources that will help me: people who might be
> willing to talk to me who have done this kind of work, things I should
> read about enterprise level work, listservs I should be on, etc.
>
> In addition to general resources, specific questions for now, more may
> follow later:
> 1) We need to convince the company to buy one of the large
> accessibility packages that operates with their bug tracker to clean
> up the static web pages. What factors do we need to
> consider/understand in evaluating which one we should recommend?
> 2) Has anyone done a workshop specifically for a QA team? What factors
> do I need to consider with this audience that I might not think about
> in a general web accessibility tutorial?
>
> thanks so very much,
> Katherine
>
> --
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Katherine Mancuso: crusader of community art, social technology, & disability
>
> Research:
> Center for Assistive Technology & Environmental Access (http://www.catea.org)
> Georgia Tech, Digital Media (http://dm.gatech.edu)
>
> Community:
> The Vesuvius Group: metaverse community builders
> (http://www.thevesuviusgroup.com)
> Gimp Girl Community Liaison/Research Fellow (http://www.gimpgirl.com)
> Alternate ROOTS: arts*community*activism (http://www.alternateroots.org)
> Students Working Against Negative Stereotypes of Autism, Georgia Tech.
> ( <EMAIL REMOVED> )
>
> Contact in the web, the metaverse, the world:
> http://twitter.com/musingvirtual
> http://muse.dreamwidth.org
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/kathymancuso
> SL: Muse Carmona
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>